Individuals and organizations are rapidly accumulating large collections of digital content, including still images, text, graphics, animated graphics, and full-motion video images. This content may be presented individually or combined in a wide variety of different forms, including documents, catalogs, presentations, still photographs, commercial videos, home movies, and metadata describing one or more associated digital content files. As these collections grow in number and diversity, individuals and organizations increasingly will require systems and methods for organizing and presenting the digital content in their collections. To meet this need, a variety of different systems and methods for organizing and presenting digital content have been proposed.
For example, there are several digital albuming systems that enable users to create digital photo albums manually. These systems typically provide tools for organizing a collection of images and laying out these images on one or more pages. Among the common types of tools for manually creating a digital photo album are tools for selecting a subset of images in the collection that will appear on a page of an album, a graphical user interface for manually rearranging the images on the page, and basic image editing tools for modifying various characteristics, such as size and orientation, of the images that will appear in the album. Users typically find the process of generating a digital photo album using fully manual digital albuming systems to be tedious and time consuming.
In addition, several digital content composition systems enable users to create mixed content pages. A “mixed content page” is one having a mixture of image content objects and text blocks. Text blocks may take the form of captions associated with various images or be intended to stand alone. In addition to the image editing tools mentioned above, these systems provide tools that allow the user to customize text attributes including text point size, line spacing, bolding, and italicizing. These text attributes can have a significant impact on the overall size and shape of a rendered text block, which in turn can affect the sizing and placement of other graphic objects on a page. Again, users typically find the process of generating a mixed content page using fully manual digital systems to be tedious and time consuming.
Throughout the drawings, identical reference numbers designate similar, but not necessarily identical, elements.